“Money doesn’t just buy you a better life…it also makes you a better person,” proclaims Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) early on in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese’s epic ode to greed and decadence. You can, he continues, “save the [bleeping] spotted owl with money.” What Belfort doesn’t get is that, like the drugs he copiously ingests, being filthy rich only exaggerates the qualities a person already has. In his case, that means it only makes him more of a narcissistic, manipulative, hedonistic, charismatic blowhard. Luckily for us, he’s also a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

Scorsese hasn’t made a mafia picture since “Casino,” but with “Wolf” he’s once again tackling organized crime. Instead of Italian-American strivers building illegal empires and doling out rough justice from behind a veil of omerta, though, he gives us an ambitious young stockbroker coming of age during the “greed is good” 1980s, plowing through cocaine, pills and prostitutes like some Reagan-Era Rasputin until it all, inevitably, collapses.

Exposing the nefarious side of the financial industry isn’t anything new -- we've seen it in films from “Wall Street” to “Boiler Room” (also inspired by Belfort's story) to “Margin Call” -- but never have the excesses been this excessive. At a full three hours, the movie flirts with wearing out its welcome about two-thirds through, but recovers to end up an exhausting, operatic black comedy that leaves you wanting more.

This is DiCaprio and Scorsese’s fifth collaboration, and it’s easy to see why the actor brought the real Jordan Belfort’s memoir to the attention of the director. His performance is furiously pitched throughout, whether screaming motivation into a microphone during sales meetings or hurling invective at some unfortunate employee or spouse. But he also shows off some fantastic, loose-limbed physical comedy skills, including a narcotized freakout in a country club lobby that has to be seen to be believed.

Belfort starts out just another ambitious rookie broker, but gets valuable tutelage from his first boss, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, in a brief, hilarious performance apparently filmed before regaining the weight he lost for “Dallas Buyers Club”). After October 1987’s Black Monday, Belfort’s out of work and desperate, but soon discovers the world of largely unregulated “penny stocks” and starts hauling in outsized commissions by charismatically fleecing unsophisticated investors he cold-calls — he’s the ultimate telemarketer. Partnering with the bizarre, luminously-toothed, suburban Caligula Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), and training a few of his old pals from Queens in the fine art of sales, he founds Stratton Oakmont, a prestigious-seeming, wholly unethical firm that, of course, prospers.

The place quickly becomes a den of white male iniquity, and Scorsese walks a thin line between laughing at and laughing with antics such as dwarf-tossing, office chimps on roller skates, and, most disturbingly, a strain of vicious, unrelenting misogyny directed toward the few women in the office as well as the squadrons of hookers who parade through the place. The victims of this ill treatment include both Belfort’s quickly discarded starter wife (Cristin Milioti) and her gorgeous, strong-willed successor (Margot Robbie, a newcomer whose performance marks her as much more than a pretty face).

The litany of orgiastic indulgence borders on the absurd, and the 71-year-old Scorsese (working with his 73-year-old editor, Thelma Schoonmaker) gets as raunchy here as he ever has. If the plethora of frontal female nudity and relentlessly vulgar language doesn’t turn off the moralists, the scene where inhaling a vial of cocaine is compared to Popeye eating his spinach probably will. And if there’s a sudden resurgence in the popularity of Quaaludes, we’ll know who to blame.

This isn’t an immoral, or even amoral, movie, though. It's one that has enough respect for its audience to know that they know how it’s all going to end. Belfort runs afoul of an FBI agent (Kyle Chandler), and is eventually driven to as much desperation and paranoia as Henry Hill in “Goodfellas.” It’s also hinted, but never hammered, that Belfort’s only doing to ordinary Americans what the banking industry in general has been doing, less crassly and less obviously, for years.

For all the excess “Wolf” depicts, though, Scorsese’s direction is relatively restrained, and, as usual, the flourishes he does execute are in service to the story. One impressive tracking shot flies through Oakmont’s vast trading floor, another follows Belfort during a domestic confrontation where his nastiness finally, and literally, hits home.

On top of all that, the vast supporting cast is nearly perfect, especially Rob Reiner as Belfort’s sensible dad, Joanna Lumley as a British in-law, and Jean Dujardin as a snarky Swiss banker. Spike Jonze pops up as an early penny-stock mentor, and Fran Liebowitz (the subject of Scorsese’s “Public Speaking”) gets to play a judge.

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is an overstuffed, pedal-to-the-metal joyride through a life lived according to the purest precepts of free-market capitalism. Justifying his larceny yet again, Belfort declares that he deserves the money he scams people out of, because “I know how to spend it better.” Working with a budget estimated at $100 million, that’s a boast that should be coming out of the movie’s director, not its yacht-destroying, wealth-consuming antihero.

The lowdown: A charismatic stockbroker makes fortunes and lives a lavish, drug-fueled lifestyle in Martin Scorsese’s epic, darkly hilarious adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s memoir. Overstuffed even at three hours, it’s a pedal-to-the-metal joyride through the Wall Street decadence of the 1980s and its eventual downfall.